Blaire
BLAIRE
“So … the whole village is Skin Thieves,” Ellis remarked, taking a long, noisy slurp from a cup of blood. She was unusually pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes, but with each swallow, color returned to her face.
’s eyebrows rose. “And you just … got wasted with them?”
Ellis rolled her eyes. “Do I look wasted?”
“You look like you mainlined an entire distillery,” Roman interjected dryly. “But I suppose that’s better than you coming back covered in blood and telling us you massacred the entire lot of them.”
Ellis shot her brother a withering look. “I kill cleanly, thank you very much, Roman Forbes. And in any case, they’re unlike any other pack I’ve come across. The alpha—Clay—he’s big on the Golden Rule. Told everyone that unless I started something, they were to let me be.”
“Did you get anything on the Operation? Do they know anything?” Farida interrupted sharply. watched the female from under her lashes. She seemed agitated. Nothing like the cold, detached fa?ade she’d shown and Raoul the night before.
Ellis smirked. “There’s a large facility, about three hundred miles southeast of here. They believe it’s a military base. That’s about all they know. They did scout it out years ago when it was first built. The humans in the base don’t stray far into the forest, and the base itself is outside of the pack’s territory, so again, Clay has enforced his Rule. If the Candies aren’t bothering the pack, the pack leaves the Candies alone.”
She punctuated her report with another loud slurp.
“That has to be the place we’re after,” Farida muttered. “I need to … I’m just going to do some further investigation.”
Without another word, she left the room. let out a breath, her eyes darting to Roman, who watched her with an odd expression. Did he have any clue about what had happened last night? Had Farida’s little spell, or whatever the hell she’d done to ’s brain, worked?
“Do you need to drink from me, Sweetest?” he asked softly, stepping towards her, his hand sliding down her arm, fingers curling around her wrist. “You look a little unwell.”
managed a wan smile. “Just tired. I didn’t sleep great last night.”
Roman’s eyebrows furrowed. “You barely stirred.”
No, YOU barely stirred , thought, then checked herself before she thought about it too much further. The last thing she needed was him prying into what her night had been like. Farida assured her that any thoughts of the conversation with her and Raoul would be locked away from Roman, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t blurt something out loud that would give the game up.
Fuck, she hated lying to him. ‘No more secrets,’ she’d made him promise. Yet here she was, keeping the mother of all secrets from him. But she was doing it to protect him. To protect his memories, however untrue they might be. To let him keep his slightly less tragic backstory intact.
But hadn’t that been why he’d kept secrets from her, too? So why was it okay for her, and not for him?
She could think around in circles until her brain exploded, and she didn’t think she would be able to reason away her guilt.
“Maybe a drink would help,” she conceded with a tiny smile. Roman’s eyes lit up a brilliant emerald, and her insides warmed.
“If you two plan to start fucking in front of me, at least let me get a bucket ready for the inevitable upchuck,” Ellis grouched.
“We are leaving,” Roman told her firmly, his voice a low rasp. “Although, don’t be surprised if you can still hear us.”
Ellis made a gagging sound. didn’t turn to see if it was fake or if her friend was really hurling. She just followed Roman out, more than ready to lose herself in him. Let him make her forget for a while.
A thoroughly disheveled found her way back to the den just over an hour later. She was alone—Roman had gone to seek out Farida to see if she had any further intel from whatever ‘investigation’ she was doing.
Ellis looked up from where she was sprawled on the chaise lounge. “Well, a good dicking was clearly what you needed,” she remarked, picking up an apple and taking a bite. Juice sluiced down her chin.
shrugged. “Maybe it’s what you need, too. You still look a bit peaky.” She nudged Ellis’s feet until she moved them, and she flopped onto the lounge. Ellis caged her in with her legs, eyeing her.
“Hey, I sacrificed myself for the ‘Save Jack and Jude’ cause last night. I drank my body weight in bathtub whisky so that the Skins would drink too and get loose-lipped.”
shrugged. “Doesn’t mean you don’t have … urges.” She straightened, looking over at Ellis with wide eyes. “You have … you know … before?”
“I have what, before?” she asked, all innocent confusion, except for the twinkle in her tired eyes.
“You’ve been with a guy before, haven’t you … or a girl?”
Ellis giggled. “Both,” she replied, then laughed harder at ’s gaping mouth. “At the same time, too!”
shook her head, her cheeks pink. “Alright, I walked right into that one. Of course you have, you’re like a thousand. That’s a long time to go without.”
Ellis snorted. “I’m only a hundred and eighty. Still a baby, really.”
The sheepish smile slipped from ’s face. It had been one hundred and seventy-five years since Tilly was vaporized by Farida. Since Ellis, a little five-year-old girl, still mortal, screamed for the only mother she’d known.
“Hey,” Ellis said, her voice no longer teasing. “What just happened in there? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
She leaned forward, tapping on the temple. A chill tingled ’s spine. The truth was like a weight in her chest. But she couldn’t offload it to Ellis. For starters, she’d never believe what had to say. She had her memory magically inserted into her brain by Farida.
But also … she just couldn’t uproot the status quo. It would be like pulling the pin on a grenade and throwing it right at everything Roman and Ellis believed. She couldn’t do it. Not when they were so close to getting Jack and Jude back, and they needed to be a team, a cohesive unit.
“I’m just … I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot,” she lied. “I … I was so mad with her and with Dad—with Harvey, for the lies they’d told me. But they shot at her, and then they took them all, and … what if they’re not inside this Operation facility? Or what if we can’t get in? Or we do get in, but we can’t find them? Or we all get caught?”
Now that she said the words out loud, they seemed like things she really should have been worrying about. No one was saying much about what the plan was when they got there. Only that Farida would sort it out.
Roman and Ellis trusted Farida so implicitly. But what had she done to earn that trust? Used her … powers, to force them to have faith in her? Lied to them the entire time they’d known her.
What else was Farida hiding from them?
“Okay … valid. Everything you just said, totally valid,” Ellis said softly. “But look at it this way. What other lead do we have to go on? And all the signs point to this place being where the Operation is holding them. Hopefully, all of them in one place, but even if we get one of them out … even if it’s just Jude, then that’s something. And we can keep looking.”
Ellis sat up, balancing her apple core on the back of the lounge and reaching a hand out to squeeze ’s. “We won’t stop looking until we get Jack back. And your parents, too. Even if it’s just so you can tell them to get fucked for what they did to you.”
managed a watery smile. “Thanks, El. And you’re right. I just … it’s a government facility. And no one seems even slightly concerned about how we will get inside. Or out.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Ellis said, her tone blasé. “Farida will work out the details.”
bit her tongue so hard she tasted blood.
Once they had Jack out safely … then she could decide if she could bring herself to tell Roman and Ellis the truth.